chimaya

'Chimaya roots taste good! Sort of sweet with a little minty-mustardy edge.' I took the first bite of the root. My wife Deborah and I were sitting at the dining room table with books and computer, researching more information on Chimaya.

After the recent column on the use of high-tech equipment while daytripping, JoAnn Merritt had gone to the one known Midland County site for the species, flagging a dozen specimens with surveyor's tape so that my wife Deborah and I could easily find them. And, boy, did we find them - we found hundreds of plants in an hour of tromping around! We carefully dug up two of the plants - one to transplant in our rock garden, and one to eat. We have a small garden that is 60 percent caliche rock mixed with composted cotton hulls, manure and blowsand, in which we have planted Crucifixion Thorn, Perennial Lemoncillo, Creeping Salvia and other plants found only in rocky soil.

While we were at the site, we had tasted the leaves but had nothing with which to wash the dirt off of the root before tasting it. "The leaves don't taste like cilantro, though - more like parsley with a bite." Deborah meditated on the taste for a minute. "It is not too bad - it just wasn't what was expected."

The Bill Dunmire and Gail Tierney book, "Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province," that got us on this "kick" to find out how it tastes listed three or four species of Chimaya, genus Cymopterus. "Maybe this is not fendleri but another of the genus." She nodded in agreement and grimaced, "Why didn't we bring the laptop?"

While at the Midland County site, Deborah noticed some ecological affiliations of Chimaya. "It is almost always near a Dutchman's breeches." (This is a strange wildflower with the strangest shaped red "flowers," that perfectly mimic a miniature pair of pantaloons. We dug up ` specimdn of it for the rock garden that day as well, along with a specimen of wild alyssum, otherwise known as mountain peppergrass.) "Many of the plants have been directly below larger boulders poking up out of the ground - it may be that the rocks help funnel moisture to the plants." Deborah's superb analytical and observational skills are a blessing - she inspires me!

She went online as soon as we got home while I planted our "haul" from our brief little daytrip. After washing the root of the other Chimaya plant, I picked out of our library a dozen plant identification books and joined her. She greeted me with, "There are at least 30 species of Cymopterus, and they can be quite variable in color." I opened the books and found members of the genus listed from Canada to Mexico and in many varying habitats. In the 1970s I often wrote in my field guides the location of where I first identified a plant - and one book had a notation "Big Spring State Park" beside Cymopterus fendleri. I looked at the picture. "Cymopterus fendleri has yellow blossoms. I don't remember - did I find it or the species we found here in Midland County?" She found a Web site with photographs of two dozen species of the genus.

I opened Harold Rickett's 3-volume set of "Wildflowers of the Great Plains and Central Mountains." At the same time both of us blurted, "Bulbosus - our species' name is bulbosus." I showed her a drawing of the root of the species - and it matched our specimen on the table between us. We both read our sources for a minute. Outloud, I said, "Hmmm - a common name for it is biscuitroot - I've heard of that - it was heavily utilized by Indians." She googled again, typing in "biscuitroot recipes."

"Biscuitroot provided up to 50 percent of the diet of many tribes of Indians. Some of it they ate raw in the spring. The rest would be harvested over a 40-day period in the spring, and then dried. Then they ground it up to make a flour that could be stored. It was cooked into a giant tortilla, mixed with wild onions and other flavorings and dipped into stews." She read a bit further. "Whoops - that is for biscuitroot of the genus Lomatium, which is a very closely related genus." She googled again.

"There are over 80 species of Lomatium. Hmmm … here is a scientific paper about the relationships between the two genera. Evidently all of them have edible roots. Some species are supposedly better tasting than others." I then took the above-mentioned first bite. Deborah liked the taste, too, as did a visitor a few minutes later.

I told JoAnn about the identification. "But, Burr, bulbosus is how it is listed on the Midland County wildflower checklist. You identified it in the big book by Correll and Johnson when I found it in the 1980s." That book has no pictures - just technical scientific descriptions. I had seen the species but once or twice in the intervening 20 years - I am not often in its proper habitat during its brief time of visibility in March.

I kept thinking about the notation in the book about finding the yellow-blossomed species at Big Spring State Park. I had to go and see if I had misidentified it, or if a second species could be found just 40 miles away. Deborah and I headed over on a weekday evening.

A few minutes after 6 p.m. we stopped at the unmanned kiosk, paid our entry fees and then slowly motored up the hill, passing a dozen folks walking on the bike lane of the road. Big Spring residents consider the State Park the best place for an exercise hike. The road goes up to the top of the mesa and back down and might be two miles in length. Juniper, shrub oak, mesquite, Mexican buckeye, hackberry, chittamwood and agarita form a forest, and the rock ledges create a "mountainous" landscape. The agarita was in bloom, and its sweet scent swept in through my open window.

I parked at the group picnic shelter just east of the headquarters building. We got out and always being the one to bolt, I started hurriedly walking in the direction of a rock ledge. I had gone no more than five steps when from behind me I heard Deborah clear her throat in a reproving way. I turned, and she pointed down. Cymopterus bulbosus. I had walked past three specimens in the grass. In pre-Internet days, with a very limited number of books available for plant identification, I had misidentified the species at the State Park.

We walked until sunset. We found hundreds of Anemones, a plant common throughout the hill country of Texas in late February and early March, an obligate of rocky limestone based soils. We found perennial and annual bladderpod, fleabane daisy, puccoon, annual yellow evening primrose and its kin, perennial sundrops, blue gilia, 4-nerve daisy and millions of little white draba. "We haven't found Dutchman's breeches," I told Deborah.

Just before we left to eat pollo borracho and enchiladas at the Red Mesa Grill, I discovered a sprawling plant with tiny yellow flowers that were ball shaped. "Bladderpod," Deborah said, but I shook my head and clambered up the rocky slope to take a tiny branch to look at the flower. "I don't know what it is." When we got home, I spent an hour going through books, and still did not find it. At 5.30 a.m. the next morning when I woke up, I knew what it was - Dutchman's breeches! I turned on the computer, and the first Web site with pictures of the species had a close up of the yellow balls. I checked the books - none had a picture of the yellow balls. Although I see Dutchman's breeches every year, I had never seen the plant without the pantaloon shaped seedpods. Though my conscious memory indicated I had never seen the yellow balls before, my subconscious had not forgotten.